This is how education and training influence your intelligence

There are still those who say that intelligence is a trait you are born with and is completely impervious to change.. As if it were the color of your eyes, the height or the shape of your hair.

If this really were the case, there would be no difference between people who have received an education and people who have never been to school, or people who have grown up in stimulating and people who have grown up in poverty.

We know that intelligence is housed in the most malleable and changeable organ of all. It is to be expected, then, that the intellect has the same properties and is capable of being trained and empowered in various aspects.

One intelligence or several?

Models that theorize the composition of intelligence or intelligences there are so many that we will not stop to examine them. But it is important to bear in mind that there is no single unifying theory, although they all speak more or less of the same thing and refer to the same psychological phenomenon.

When we speak of intelligence we speak of the ability of our mind to face and adapt with the greatest speed and efficiency to the demands of the environment. These demands can be of all kinds, mathematical, linguistic, kinetic, musical, and so on. Perhaps there is a single intelligence that is manifested through these abilities to a greater or lesser extent depending on the person, or perhaps they are separate intelligences that serve to successfully cope with different types of homework. For the purpose of this article

let's stick with the general definition of intelligence as ability.

• You may be interested in this article by the psychologist Bertrand Regader: "Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences"

Inherited intelligence

Through twin studies, we know that there is a strong correlation between monozygotic twin IQs separated at birth, while the correlation of the IQs of non-genetically identical blood siblings is not as strong. Furthermore, when we take families with adopted children, we see that the IQ of adopted children correlates more with biological parents than with current ones.

So we know that intelligence, or at least the IQ we get from measuring it, is largely determined by DNA. Some here would shelve the development of intelligence and be content with this explanation. Fortunately, the issue is more complex.

The trained intelligence

That one is born with a certain capacity does not mean that he will keep it forever for free. One can be born with genetics that allow them to develop athlete's legs and end up atrophying them after spending hours and hours sitting. Something similar happens with intelligence: he who does not train it ends up stagnating it.

Stimulation-rich environments such as books or interactive games promote the intellectual development of children. We know this through adoption studies, where children who come from very impoverished backgrounds, receiving stimulation in adoptive families with a higher purchasing power and more stimulation, manage to reach IQ levels well above the average. Not only do families play a fundamental role in intellectual development, schooling, type of methodology that teachers use to influence decisively on the intelligence of students kids.

At this point someone will wonder: if the environment is such a powerful force, Can't we optimize the teaching methodology of schools to improve the intelligence of students? The truth is that it can be done and a multitude of projects have been developed over the last 30 years under this same premise.

The Intelligence Project

An example can be found in the Venezuelan Intelligence Project. It is a program from the 1980s aimed at improving the thinking skills of children. students and detect in what way both the way of teaching and the material itself could be optimized didactic. Units in this program include lessons on reasoning, language comprehension, verbal reasoning, problem solving, decision making and inventive thinking.

What is innovative about the program is not only its content, but the way it is taught to students. Moving away from the traditional approach that considers that learning is only the transmission of knowledge, the program is groundbreaking because it sees learning as a preparation and incentive process to manage one's own development personal.

The results after the implementation of this program were positive. Teachers reported changes in academic performance, especially those who apply the knowledge learned to other subjects. In addition, due to the more affective relationship that is generated between students and teachers, behavioral and affective changes occur on students. This closer relationship between teacher and student has a facilitating impact on learning.

The North Carolina Alphabet Project

This project developed by the University of North Carolina in the 70's aims to produce long-term positive effects on the intellectual development of children through an education of high quality, with an emphasis on early interventions that cushion the disadvantages of children from poor backgrounds.

It is a project that is applied from birth to the age of five. In this program, children go five days a week to a center where they receive high-quality educational attention that addresses children's intellectual needs through language and conversation activities, close care, and games educational.

Not all children participate in the same games, the game assignment is personalized. These interactive games between children and adults include some traditional ones, such as the "cucutrás" or "peek-a-boo" in English, and as its development progresses, others more focused on concepts and skills are added concrete.

Children who go through this program have greater proficiency in reading, math, and a slight increase in IQ. Likewise, these children have a better school adjustment, understood as longer schooling time, lower rate of school dropout, higher percentage of children who complete the university period and less probability of being parents teenagers.

Although the results should be interpreted with caution, in general It seems that it is a beneficial program for the intelligence of children that translates into greater academic competence and a better job prospect in adult life.

These programs shed light on the relationship between training, both early and throughout schooling, and increased intellectual competence. The old vision of intelligence as an immovable monolith is discarded, since we now know that it is malleable and susceptible to change depending on how we educate it.